¹ The author wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness to his colleagues, Dr. George L. Trager and Dr. Morris Swadesh, with whom some of these questions of category have been discussed.

² There is of course a minority group of possible or theoretically possible sentences, e.g. The fish appeared, in which plural is not distinguished from singular. But in actual speech such sentences are embedded in a larger context which has already established the plurality or the singularity of the thing discussed. (Otherwise such a sentence is not likely to occur.) Such minority types are not considered in the distinction between overt and covert, i.e. they do not prevent a category from being classed as overt. In covert categories the unmarked forms are relatively numerous, often in the majority, and are undistinguished even by context.

³ There are a very few names of indeterminate or double gender: Frances (Francis), Jessie (Jesse) or Jess, Jean (Gene), Jocelyn, Sidney, Wynne, and perhaps a few others. The number is increased if we include nicknames like Bobby, Jerry, etc.; but all in all such cases are relatively so few that they in no way disturb our alignment of facts.

⁴ An ‘empty’ word or stem is probably one that is highly specialized for grammatical or syntactic indication, perhaps in a way that does not admit of being assigned a concrete meaning. For example, such a form might have no other meaning than to serve as the reactance of some other category, or as the signature of a modulus category (see the next paragraph).

⁵ B. L. Whorf and G. L. Trager, The Relationship of Uto-Aztecan and Tanoan, American Anthropologist 39.609–24 (1937).

⁶ See Mary Haas Swadesh and Morris Swadesh, A Visit to the Other World: a Nitinat Text, IJAL 7.3–4 (1933).

⁷ Stativation is a term used to denote the modulus of forms which are contrasted with verbations in a way similar to that in which nouns, as a selective category, are contrasted with verbs in the languages that have such a contrast. It is used here instead of ‘nomination’ or ‘nominalization’ because these terms through past usage have come to suggest derivations rather than moduli, while ‘stativation’ helps us to think of the form not as a noun derived from a verb, but simply as a lexeme which has been affected by a certain meaningful grammatical coloring as a part of certain configurations.

⁸ Since these Hebrew examples are used only to illustrate vowel-patterns, they are written in approximate morphophonemic orthography, which does not attempt to show the distinction between the stops b, g, k, etc. and the spirants which replace them after vowels under regular statable conditions.

⁹ Adjectivation in English is another modulus which is applied both to bare lexemes and to selective nouns, but there are also selective adjectives, and these are not modulated into substantives.